IV

It began like that--and continued, with varying shades of intensity, on

such a note right up to the dénouement. Dexter surrendered a part of

himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he

had ever come in contact. Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the

full pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of method, no

jockeying for position or premeditation of effects--there was a very

little mental side to any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious

to the highest degree of her physical loveliness. Dexter had no desire

to change her. Her deficiencies were knit up with a passionate energy

that transcended and justified them.

When, as Judy's head lay against his shoulder that first night, she

whispered, "I don't know what's the matter with me. Last night I thought

I was in love with a man and to-night I think I'm in love with

you----"--it seemed to him a beautiful and romantic thing to say. It was

the exquisite excitability that for the moment he controlled and owned.

But a week later he was compelled to view this same quality in a

different light. She took him in her roadster to a picnic supper, and

after supper she disappeared, likewise in her roadster, with another

man. Dexter became enormously upset and was scarcely able to be decently

civil to the other people present. When she assured him that she had not

kissed the other man, he knew she was lying--yet he was glad that she

had taken the trouble to lie to him.

He was, as he found before the summer ended, one of a varying dozen who

circulated about her. Each of them had at one time been favored above

all others--about half of them still basked in the solace of occasional

sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through

long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him

to tag along for a year or so longer. Judy made these forays upon the

helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there

was anything mischievous in what she did.

When a new man came to town every one dropped out--dates were

automatically cancelled.

The helpless part of trying to do anything about it was that she did it

all herself. She was not a girl who could be "won" in the kinetic

sense--she was proof against cleverness, she was proof against charm; if

any of these assailed her too strongly she would immediately resolve the

affair to a physical basis, and under the magic of her physical splendor

the strong as well as the brilliant played her game and not their own.

She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the

direct exercise of her own charm. Perhaps from so much youthful love, so

many youthful lovers, she had come, in self-defense, to nourish herself

wholly from within.

Succeeding Dexter's first exhilaration came restlessness and

dissatisfaction. The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her was

opiate rather than tonic. It was fortunate for his work during the

winter that those moments of ecstasy came infrequently. Early in their

acquaintance it had seemed for a while that there was a deep and

spontaneous mutual attraction--that first August, for example--three

days of long evenings on her dusky veranda, of strange wan kisses

through the late afternoon, in shadowy alcoves or behind the protecting

trellises of the garden arbors, of mornings when she was fresh as a

dream and almost shy at meeting him in the clarity of the rising day.

There was all the ecstasy of an engagement about it, sharpened by his

realization that there was no engagement. It was during those three days

that, for the first time, he had asked her to marry him. She said "maybe

some day," she said "kiss me," she said "I'd like to marry you," she

said "I love you"--she said--nothing.

The three days were interrupted by the arrival of a New York man who

visited at her house for half September. To Dexter's agony, rumor

engaged them. The man was the son of the president of a great trust

company. But at the end of a month it was reported that Judy was

yawning. At a dance one night she sat all evening in a motor-boat with a

local beau, while the New Yorker searched the club for her frantically.

She told the local beau that she was bored with her visitor, and two

days later he left. She was seen with him at the station, and it was

reported that he looked very mournful indeed.

On this note the summer ended. Dexter was twenty-four, and he found

himself increasingly in a position to do as he wished. He joined two

clubs in the city and lived at one of them. Though he was by no means an

integral part of the stag-lines at these clubs, he managed to be on hand

at dances where Judy Jones was likely to appear. He could have gone out

socially as much as he liked--he was an eligible young man, now, and

popular with down-town fathers. His confessed devotion to Judy Jones had

rather solidified his position. But he had no social aspirations and

rather despised the dancing men who were always on tap for the Thursday

or Saturday parties and who filled in at dinners with the younger

married set. Already he was playing with the idea of going East to New

York. He wanted to take Judy Jones with him. No disillusion as to the

world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her

desirability.

Remember that--for only in the light of it can what he did for her be

understood.

Eighteen months after he first met Judy Jones he became engaged to

another girl. Her name was Irene Scheerer, and her father was one of the

men who had always believed in Dexter. Irene was light-haired and sweet

and honorable, and a little stout, and she had two suitors whom she

pleasantly relinquished when Dexter formally asked her to marry him.

Summer, fall, winter, spring, another summer, another fall--so much he

had given of his active life to the incorrigible lips of Judy Jones. She

had treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with

indifference, with contempt. She had inflicted on him the innumerable

little slights and indignities possible in such a case--as if in revenge

for having ever cared for him at all. She had beckoned him and yawned at

him and beckoned him again and he had responded often with bitterness

and narrowed eyes. She had brought him ecstatic happiness and

intolerable agony of spirit. She had caused him untold inconvenience and

not a little trouble. She had insulted him, and she had ridden over him,

and she had played his interest in her against his interest in his

work--for fun. She had done everything to him except to criticise

him--this she had not done--it seemed to him only because it might have

sullied the utter indifference she manifested and sincerely felt toward

him.

When autumn had come and gone again it occurred to him that he could not

have Judy Jones. He had to beat this into his mind but he convinced

himself at last. He lay awake at night for a while and argued it over.

He told himself the trouble and the pain she had caused him, he

enumerated her glaring deficiencies as a wife. Then he said to himself

that he loved her, and after a while he fell asleep. For a week, lest he

imagined her husky voice over the telephone or her eyes opposite him at

lunch, he worked hard and late, and at night he went to his office and

plotted out his years.

At the end of a week he went to a dance and cut in on her once. For

almost the first time since they had met he did not ask her to sit out

with him or tell her that she was lovely. It hurt him that she did not

miss these things--that was all. He was not jealous when he saw that

there was a new man to-night. He had been hardened against jealousy long

before.

He stayed late at the dance. He sat for an hour with Irene Scheerer and

talked about books and about music. He knew very little about either.

But he was beginning to be master of his own time now, and he had a

rather priggish notion that he--the young and already fabulously

successful Dexter Green--should know more about such things.

That was in October, when he was twenty-five. In January, Dexter and

Irene became engaged. It was to be announced in June, and they were to

be married three months later.

The Minnesota winter prolonged itself interminably, and it was almost

May when the winds came soft and the snow ran down into Black Bear Lake

at last. For the first time in over a year Dexter was enjoying a certain

tranquillity of spirit. Judy Jones had been in Florida, and afterward in

Hot Springs, and somewhere she had been engaged, and somewhere she had

broken it off. At first, when Dexter had definitely given her up, it had

made him sad that people still linked them together and asked for news

of her, but when he began to be placed at dinner next to Irene Scheerer

people didn't ask him about her any more--they told him about her. He

ceased to be an authority on her.

May at last. Dexter walked the streets at night when the darkness was

damp as rain, wondering that so soon, with so little done, so much of

ecstasy had gone from him. May one year back had been marked by Judy's

poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence--it had been one of

those rare times when he fancied she had grown to care for him. That old

penny's worth of happiness he had spent for this bushel of content. He

knew that Irene would be no more than a curtain spread behind him, a

hand moving among gleaming tea-cups, a voice calling to children ...

fire and loveliness were gone, the magic of nights and the wonder of the

varying hours and seasons ... slender lips, down-turning, dropping to

his lips and bearing him up into a heaven of eyes.... The thing was deep

in him. He was too strong and alive for it to die lightly.

In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on the

thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at Irene's

house. Their engagement was to be announced in a week now--no one would

be surprised at it. And to-night they would sit together on the lounge

at the University Club and look on for an hour at the dancers. It gave

him a sense of solidity to go with her--she was so sturdily popular, so

intensely "great."

He mounted the steps of the brownstone house and stepped inside.

"Irene," he called.

Mrs. Scheerer came out of the living-room to meet him.

"Dexter," she said, "Irene's gone up-stairs with a splitting headache.

She wanted to go with you but I made her go to bed."

"Nothing serious, I----"

"Oh, no. She's going to play golf with you in the morning. You can spare

her for just one night, can't you, Dexter?"

Her smile was kind. She and Dexter liked each other. In the living-room

he talked for a moment before he said good-night.

Returning to the University Club, where he had rooms, he stood in the

doorway for a moment and watched the dancers. He leaned against the

door-post, nodded at a man or two--yawned.

"Hello, darling."

The familiar voice at his elbow startled him. Judy Jones had left a man

and crossed the room to him--Judy Jones, a slender enamelled doll in

cloth of gold: gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper points at

her dress's hem. The fragile glow of her face seemed to blossom as she

smiled at him. A breeze of warmth and light blew through the room. His

hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket tightened spasmodically. He

was filled with a sudden excitement.

"When did you get back?" he asked casually.

"Come here and I'll tell you about it."

She turned and he followed her. She had been away--he could have wept at

the wonder of her return. She had passed through enchanted streets,

doing things that were like provocative music. All mysterious

happenings, all fresh and quickening hopes, had gone away with her, come

back with her now.

She turned in the doorway.

"Have you a car here? If you haven't, I have."

"I have a coupé."

In then, with a rustle of golden cloth. He slammed the door. Into so many

cars she had stepped--like this--like that--her back against the

leather, so--her elbow resting on the door--waiting. She would have been

soiled long since had there been anything to soil her--except

herself--but this was her own self outpouring.

With an effort he forced himself to start the car and back into the

street. This was nothing, he must remember. She had done this before,

and he had put her behind him, as he would have crossed a bad account

from his books.

He drove slowly down-town and, affecting abstraction, traversed the

deserted streets of the business section, peopled here and there where a

movie was giving out its crowd or where consumptive or pugilistic youth

lounged in front of pool halls. The clink of glasses and the slap of

hands on the bars issued from saloons, cloisters of glazed glass and

dirty yellow light.

She was watching him closely and the silence was embarrassing; yet in

this crisis he could find no casual word with which to profane the hour.

At a convenient turning he began to zigzag back toward the University

Club.

"Have you missed me?" she asked suddenly.

"Everybody missed you."

He wondered if she knew of Irene Scheerer. She had been back only a

day--her absence had been almost contemporaneous with his engagement.

"What a remark!" Judy laughed sadly--without sadness. She looked at him

searchingly. He became absorbed in the dashboard.

"You're handsomer than you used to be," she said thoughtfully. "Dexter,

you have the most rememberable eyes."

He could have laughed at this, but he did not laugh. It was the sort of

thing that was said to sophomores. Yet it stabbed at him.

"I'm awfully tired of everything, darling." She called every one

darling, endowing the endearment with careless, individual comraderie.

"I wish you'd marry me."

The directness of this confused him. He should have told her now that he

was going to marry another girl, but he could not tell her. He could as

easily have sworn that he had never loved her.

"I think we'd get along," she continued, on the same note, "unless

probably you've forgotten me and fallen in love with another girl."

Her confidence was obviously enormous. She had said, in effect, that she

found such a thing impossible to believe, that if it were true he had

merely committed a childish indiscretion--and probably to show off. She

would forgive him, because it was not a matter of any moment but rather

something to be brushed aside lightly.

"Of course you could never love anybody but me," she continued, "I like

the way you love me. Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last year?"

"No, I haven't forgotten."

"Neither have I!"

Was she sincerely moved--or was she carried along by the wave of her own

acting?

"I wish we could be like that again," she said, and he forced himself to

answer:

"I don't think we can."

"I suppose not.... I hear you're giving Irene Scheerer a violent rush."

There was not the faintest emphasis on the name, yet Dexter was suddenly

ashamed.

"Oh, take me home," cried Judy suddenly; "I don't want to go back to

that idiotic dance--with those children."

Then, as he turned up the street that led to the residence district,

Judy began to cry quietly to herself. He had never seen her cry before.

The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up around

them, he stopped his coupé in front of the great white bulk of the

Mortimer Joneses house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the splendor

of the damp moonlight. Its solidity startled him. The strong walls, the

steel of the girders, the breadth and beam and pomp of it were there

only to bring out the contrast with the young beauty beside him. It was

sturdy to accentuate her slightness--as if to show what a breeze could

be generated by a butterfly's wing.

He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if he

moved he would find her irresistibly in his arms. Two tears had rolled

down her wet face and trembled on her upper lip.

"I'm more beautiful than anybody else," she said brokenly, "why can't I

be happy?" Her moist eyes tore at his stability--her mouth turned slowly

downward with an exquisite sadness: "I'd like to marry you if you'll

have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I'm not worth having, but I'll be

so beautiful for you, Dexter."

A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness fought on

his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying off

with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor. This

was his girl who was speaking, his own, his beautiful, his pride.

"Won't you come in?" He heard her draw in her breath sharply.

Waiting.

"All right," his voice was trembling, "I'll come in."

V

It was strange that neither when it was over nor a long time afterward

did he regret that night. Looking at it from the perspective of ten

years, the fact that Judy's flare for him endured just one month seemed

of little importance. Nor did it matter that by his yielding he

subjected himself to a deeper agony in the end and gave serious hurt to

Irene Scheerer and to Irene's parents, who had befriended him. There was

nothing sufficiently pictorial about Irene's grief to stamp itself on

his mind.

Dexter was at bottom hard-minded. The attitude of the city on his action

was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city,

but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He

was completely indifferent to popular opinion. Nor, when he had seen

that it was no use, that he did not possess in himself the power to move

fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones, did he bear any malice toward her.

He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for

loving--but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is

reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while

the deep happiness.

Even the ultimate falsity of the grounds upon which Judy terminated the

engagement that she did not want to "take him away" from Irene--Judy,

who had wanted nothing else--did not revolt him. He was beyond any

revulsion or any amusement.

He went East in February with the intention of selling out his laundries

and settling in New York--but the war came to America in March and

changed his plans. He returned to the West, handed over the management

of the business to his partner, and went into the first officers'

training-camp in late April. He was one of those young thousands who

greeted the war with a certain amount of relief, welcoming the

liberation from webs of tangled emotion.